Category Archives: Ear Training Tips

Talk of singing conjures up a wild array of emotions in people. Some love it like nothing else. Others find the notion terrifying. Regardless of which camp you fall into, there’s a simple truth about singing that is important to understand if you’re a musician: you need to sing if you want to be great. Why…

Most of our ear training practice focuses on dedicated ear training exercises. This is fair enough: these exercises allow us to break music down and focus on training our ears one step at a time. But the end goal of ear training is to be able to recognise notes and chords in real music, not…

Does playing music bring you some of the greatest joy and satisfaction in your life? When you pick up your instrument to create something unique, beautiful and full of life. And does it also cause you some of the greatest frustration as well? When your fingers just won’t do what you want them to or…

When I’m talking about ear training I spend a lot of time harping on about the tonic and about how important it is to an effective ear training approach. Once you understand this you’re on the path to training your ears and becoming a more confident and creative musician. The next step is to get…

As all of Ear Training HQ’s students know, the first step in developing relative pitch is learning to recognise the tonic. I had a student contact me recently asking how to put that together with real music. She mentioned how the tonic is clearly established in all of our exercises, but that’s not always the…

Learning to play by ear is a lot of musicians’ ultimate dream. If you’ve found Ear Training HQ you’re already on the path to achieving that dream, as everything we teach aims to help you get there. And in this article I’d like to outline what a musician who has achieved that dream is doing…

A person’s creativity in any field is closely linked to their imagination. The more imaginative you are the more interesting and unique ideas you’re likely to come up with. If you want to be a creative musician – whether it’s a prolific songwriter or an impressive performer – then you’ll want to develop your musical…

A common question from musicians who have just started with Ear Training HQ’s method is “can I use solfege instead of scale degrees?”. And the question is a good one! If you’re familiar with one system the thought of learning a new one can be rather stressful. Fortunately, if you’re comfortable with either scale degrees…

Have you ever tried to transpose a melody from one key to another? It can be very challenging. It involves some serious mental gymnastics and you need to be able to do it fast if you want to keep up. Fortunately, if you found it difficult, you were probably doing it the hard way. I…

Down here in Australia we’re going through Masterchef madness. I’m not sure if it’s the same where you live but reality TV cooking shows are seriously popular down under. I’ve been watching it from time to time, and like with a lot of things, watching people cook makes me think about ear training. Sound like…